Desktop travellers visit the world in HD as Dubai steals record from Paris

A 45 gigapixel photo of Dubai has become the world's largest photo, stealing the record from a digital panorama of the French city of love, Paris.

Travellers that like nothing better than to sit back, relax and watch the world around them can now tour the city of Dubai from the comfort of their desktop computer.

The image of Dubai is just one of the many multi-gigapixel panoramic images of famous locations being uploaded to GigaPan.org, a website that lets people upload and share high-resolution panoramas with the world.

The record-setting photo of Dubai taken by Gerald Donovan is the result of three and a half hours and almost 4,250 individual photos, all stitched together to create one visually-rich image.

"This was intended as a technical test," said Gerald Donovan. "It was about exploring the limits of the hardware and software out there."

The high-resolution image is so big that it would cover the size of approximately 1200 billboards if it were to be printed said GigaPan in a May 10 press release.

The GigaPan image of Dubai captures the city in all its stunning detail. It enables virtual travellers to zoom out and see world's largest building in all its glory, or to zoom in and examine the finer details of the image (like a woman caught sunbathing in a bikini by a pool).

If you are ready to take a virtual tour of some of the world's most beautiful locations and want to avoid getting stuck in the ash cloud travel madness, point your browser at GigaPan.com and visit some of their most popular destinations.

If jet-setting is more your thing, head to
http://www.google.com/sky/ for an outer-space tour of the night sky. Google Sky is a visual feast of spectacular nighttime images taken with the Hubble Telescope.